Similarities across Difference. An Intersectional Exploration of Women's Sexualities in the Netherlands

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Similarities across Difference. An Intersectional Exploration of Women's Sexualities in the Netherlands

Weges, I.

(2015) Faculty of Humanities Theses

(Master thesis)

Abstract

Sixteen women and their dense, rich, complicated, painful, and pleasurable stories on sexuality. So many
similarities across their apparent differences. So much shared by those women that at first sight seem to
have such different backgrounds. This thesis is a compilation, a weaving-together of the intimate stories
of sixteen women from different ethnic, ... read more cultural, religious, class, educational, and national backgrounds
who were interviewed in the Netherlands in the fall and winter of 2013. This is an account of their sexual
identities, -imaginations, -fantasies, and –practices, and how these relate to their ‘cultures’. These
cultures; imagined or organized communities that these women identify and feel connected with, include
queer culture, ethnic culture, religious culture, and various subcultures such as that of the BDSM
community, all of which come with ([un]-written and -spoken) rules, regulations, norms, and taboos.
The research question asked was “How are women’s sexualities, including their sexual identities, -
fantasies, and –practices, connected to their ‘cultures’ in the context of the ‘multicultural’ Netherlands?”
in other words, how do [these] women, in their different communities, experience the rules, regulations,
norms, and/or taboos on sexuality that aim to capture, control, and restrain female sexuality, and how do
they give shape to their sexual identities and practices amidst of these dominant yet possibly subversive
frameworks? Their answers and stories are analyzed through a theoretical framework that has
intersectionality at its core and in addition focuses on the overarching themes of power, definition(s),
subjectivity, desire, norms, constructs, sameness and difference. Intersectionality is the main ‘thinking
technology’ that will be used to understand the wide variety in the stories of these women as well as the
struggles and pleasures they share across ethnic, cultural, social, class, and religious differences. When
talking about sameness and difference in sexuality, one is also talking about gender, race, ethnicity,
culture, class, age, and other intersections or categories of identification. In this thesis, whether and how
these different intersections influence women’s sexualities will be addressed. What will become
clear is how despite the endless attempts to structure, box, regulate, and control women’s sexualities,
women always find their own ways to strategically deal with those impositions, be it sometimes by trial
and error. By giving their own meaning to rules and translating norms to their own ‘language’, they
eventually always follow their own desire, which sometimes means battling stereotypes and going
through painful processes. They are thereby continuously redefining their sexualities, which will always
be fluid and shifting, shaped and defined differently depending on where they find themselves in their
(sexual) life and relationship(s), never to be boxed, defined, fixed, or static. show less

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